The Outsider: Cold comfort from fashion faux past

By Will Jones - The Outsider | January 19,2017

“If it’s one, two, then through, you’re good to go,” explains a friend of mine but I’m not so sure I’m going to take his advice.

You know the scenario. You’ve asked for some sound direction in whatever it is that you’re doing and someone steps forward with a knowing smile to offer you a tidbit of their long learned and extensively tested wisdom but when they have finished saying what they are saying you still are nowhere nearer to the answer than when they started.

It’s a bit like the time when I asked a school pal of mine whether I could wear moccasins, white socks and baggy pants with an elastic cuff around the ankle. His advice was long and rambling, it covered fashion history, sexuality and even a bit of geography. I have to admit to being swayed by some of what he’d said, too, and by the end I thought my choice of 1980s style was cool as … and I went out to the local disco looking like the rejected offspring of a clown and an Indigenous person from a spaghetti western.

Oh, yes, you should have seen the war paint, sorry, make-up, it quite topped off my look.

That’s the point, I guess. I listened to this friend of mine back in high school and sort of took his advice, the bit that I understood, and where did it get me? I’m sorry, I can’t mention her name and it’s probably best because neither she nor I could admit to being proud of the entire debacle.

But back to one, two and then through. It seems that this is a tried and tested way of finding out if the ice is strong enough to withstand your weight when walking across a lake. If, when pounding your spud bar on the frozen surface of the lake (please, someone write in and tell me why it’s called a spud bar) it takes two hits before going through, you are OK to walk on the ice. Hmm, I have a couple of questions. How hard is one and two? And, who was it that tested out this theory to get a definitive answer?

It’s not that I don’t believe my friend. He is, after all, a big fellow, somewhat heavier than I am and the perfect person to follow out onto the frozen lake if you are at all worried that there may be thin ice ahead. However, the one, two and then through technique doesn’t really hit all the scientific buttons when I stop to query it
as an indisputable fail-safe to falling in a hole of freezing cold water.

As such, I have taken to wearing baggy pants with ankle cuffs when I venture out onto the lake early in the ice fishing season. I stuff said pants with those foam packing peanuts (they can’t escape because of the handy cuffs at the ankles) and they make for excellent buoyancy aids in the event of falling though thin ice.

I did forego the moccasins, though. For the life of me, I couldn’t find a pair with cleats anywhere!

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